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  Continuing to speak out, Dickinson in 1766 authored a pamphlet that aimed at arousing opposition to parliamentary taxation in Great Britain’s Caribbean colonies.35 But it was what he penned the following year that made Dickinson not only the most renowned American political figure but also the most widely respected public official in all the colonies.

  Dickinson had been stirred in 1766 by Parliament’s suspension of the New York assembly for its defiance of the Quartering Act. The Townshend Duties came hard on the heels of that step. Beginning in November 1767, Dickinson answered both actions of Parliament with a series of a dozen essays—he called them “letters”—which first appeared in the Pennsylvania Chronicle. In the habit of the time, Dickinson wrote anonymously, signing his pieces “A Farmer.” (Galloway immediately suspected that Dickinson was the “Farmer,” though he believed his rival had collaborated with others of the “damned republican breed” to produce what he huffed was “damned ridiculous! mere fluff!, fustian! altogether stupid and inconsistent.”)36

  From the outset, Dickinson’s essays created a sensation. Other Philadelphia newspapers rapidly reprinted his letters, and eventually nineteen of the twenty-three American newspapers printed his dozen essays. In March 1768, after the final letter in the series appeared, all twelve compositions were compiled and published as a pamphlet titled Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania to the Inhabitants of the British Colonies.37

  Letters from a Farmer was an overnight sensation. Some sixty pamphlets on the imperial crisis had previously been published in America,38 but none had equaled its sales. In fact, sales of Dickinson’s tract likely exceeded the combined sales of all previous pamphlets on Anglo-American troubles. Multiple printing runs were required to meet the public demand. A few years earlier, Dickinson—who, like most public figures, was terribly ambitious—had told a friend that someday he would “enjoy making a bustle in this world.” With Letters from a Farmer, he had achieved his goal in spades. By 1770 engravings of his image were published in almanacs and some editions of the pamphlet, his figure had been added to a waxworks museum in Boston, and a newly launched ship had been named for him, with his likeness adorning the figurehead on the vessel’s bow. In 1769 he was awarded an honorary degree by what is today Princeton University (and so too was Galloway that same year). “To the Farmer” became the most popular toast from Maine to Savannah. Numerous town meetings endorsed his publication. Several members of Parliament who were regarded as friendly to America lauded the pamphlet, as did Voltaire in France, where a French-language edition was soon published. Lord Dartmouth clipped items pertaining to Dickinson from London newspapers, though he made no public comments. Franklin in 1768 paid for the publication of Letters from a Farmer in England and, cognizant of the shifting attitudes in America and the growing popularity of critics of ministerial policy, contributed a brief preface. Whereas he had earlier directed acerbic jabs at Dickinson, calling him an upstart, Franklin now praised his “able learned Pen” and called him “a Gentleman of Repute” who was widely extolled in the colonies for his “Knowledge of … Affairs.” So popular was Dickinson that when his younger brother, Philemon, stood in for him at a Sons of Liberty rally in Boston in 1769, a record crowd of several hundred turned out.39

  No one factor explains the brilliant success of Letters from a Farmer. Dickinson wrote in a coherent and elegant manner, though he was not given to catchy, head-turning phrases, and no single sentence in the lengthy tract was widely quoted by contemporaries. The disenchantment with England and disillusionment with its leaders, which Dickinson had come to feel during his residence in London, spilled over in his writing and resonated with a colonial populace whose eyes were just opening to the threat posed by Parliament. Yet, Dickinson’s tone was not that of a fire-breathing radical, which was crucial, as most Americans were not ready for militancy. Dickinson not only specifically denounced independence but he also, with considerable optimism, promised his readers that redress would come if only the colonists united in a peaceful protest. Dickinson benefited too, in that he was among the first colonists to take up his pen against the Townshend Duties, leading sympathetic newspapers to embrace his work.

  Dickinson was also his own publicist, and he possessed a sure instinct for self-promotion. Knowing that Galloway and his followers would do all they could to limit his appeal in Pennsylvania, he reached out to activists in Boston, sending them copies of his newspaper essays with the hint that their publication would help “Kindle the Sacred Flame” of liberty throughout New England. Boston’s popular leaders found Yankee publishers for Letters from a Farmer and helped make famous “A Song for American Freedom” that Dickinson wrote early in 1768 and sent along to them as well.40 Using the melody of a popular English song of the day, Dickinson’s “Liberty Song,” as it was often called, urged for boldness and sacrifice. It began

  Come join hand in hand brave Americans all,

  And rouse your bold hearts at fair Liberty’s call.

  No tyrannous acts shall suppress your just claim,

  Or, stain with dishonour America’s name.

  In Freedom we’re born and in Freedom we’ll live,

  Our purses are ready,

  Steady, Friends, Steady.

  Not as Slaves, but as Freemen our money we’ll give.41

  In Letters from a Farmer, Dickinson started with the presumption that Parliament’s attempts to tax the colonists were “unconstitutional” and “destructive to the liberty of these colonies.” He continued: “No free people ever existed, or can ever exist, without keeping … ‘the purse strings’ in their own hands.” He reiterated what many colonial assemblies had said during the Stamp Act crisis. A tax was a tax, whether it was an internal or an external tax. From this, it followed that Americans must “answer with a total denial of the power of parliament to lay upon these colonies any ‘tax’ whatever.” However, Parliament must have the authority to regulate imperial commerce, and it was the “duty and prudence” of Americans “to maintain and defend” the power of Parliament to do so. In an oblique slam at Galloway and Franklin and other leaders who appeared unwilling to stand up to the British threat, he warned that a “people is travelling fast to destruction, when individuals consider their interests as distinct from those of the public.” He emphasized that he was not writing as an advocate of independence. The “happiness of these provinces indubitably consists in their connection with Great Britain,” he contended. Although he had cautioned about a “decay of virtue” in the mother country, he believed that peaceful protest from throughout the colonies would secure the repeal of the objectionable taxes. “Our vigilance and our union are [our] success and safety,” he said, for Americans understood that they “cannot be HAPPY, without being FREE,” and “we cannot be free, without being secure in our property.” He fervently believed, he said near the end, that “several of his Majesty’s present ministers are good men, and friends to our country,” and when they understood the “truths” that Americans held dear, they would hasten to abandon parliamentary taxation.42

  Dickinson’s newfound celebrity was only one change in his life. In the summer of 1770, at age thirty-eight, he married into the powerful Norris family. Mary, his thirty-year-old bride, was the daughter of the speaker of the house of the Pennsylvania assembly, as Grace Growdon had been seventeen years earlier, when she married Joseph Galloway. Like Grace Growdon Galloway’s father, Mary Norris Dickinson’s father was one of the wealthiest men in the colony. Rumor had it that Mary brought a dowry of eighty thousand pounds to the union. Dickinson also acquired Fairhill, the Norris property just outside Philadelphia. The sprawling estate—appraised by the tax office at a value of twenty thousand pounds—exceeded five hundred acres and included a luxurious two-story house and two separate dependencies, one of which Dickinson planned to use as a library. Even so, Dickinson wanted to put his stamp on the mansion. He immediately plunged into a major remodeling job, enlarging and recasting it in a classical Georgian manner. He additionally expande
d the already grand gardens and paved a five-hundred-yard driveway. In 1773, Josiah Quincy, a Bostonian who toured several middle and southern colonies, visited Fairhill and called it the most magnificent residence that he saw south of New England. With money to burn, Dickinson additionally acquired a lot on Chestnut Street in Philadelphia, just across from the Pennsylvania State House, and in 1771, at a cost of eight thousand pounds, began construction of a magnificent two-story town house. But in 1775, when the Second Continental Congress met, the dwelling was still not completed, and in fact, Dickinson would never live in the house. (During the war, it was used first as a hospital and then, after 1778, leased to the French minister to the United States.) Dickinson also started a family in these years. When he was forty, Mary gave birth to a daughter. A second daughter, the couple’s last child, was born shortly before the outbreak of the war.43

  Distracted by the many changes in his personal life, and attached to the minority party in the Pennsylvania legislature, Dickinson kept a low profile in the early 1770s. He was reelected annually to the assembly, usually by a near-unanimous vote. He reemerged on the bigger stage only when the Polly, the tea ship bound for Philadelphia, neared the American coast in the fall of 1773. Writing his first major essay in five years, Dickinson penned a piece for the Pennsylvania Journal that denounced the Tea Act. Calling the legislation insolent, oppressive, and “Madness,” he urged that “no Man … receive the Tea … nor suffer the Vessel, that brings it, to moor at his Wharf, and that if any Person assists in unloading, landing or storing it, he shall ever after be deemed an Enemy to his Country.”44

  The following year, when word of the Intolerable Acts reached the colonies, Dickinson attacked the repressive measures in several published letters. He took the line that London had long wished to carry out repressive actions against Massachusetts and was merely using the Boston Tea Party as a pretext. Perhaps because events were moving so rapidly that summer, these essays failed to attract the notoriety of Letters from a Farmer. In fact, by the time he wrote the final letter in the series, Pennsylvania was afire with the battle over sending a delegation to the Continental Congress. Dickinson’s target in his final epistle was Galloway, who was preventing the assembly from supporting a congress. The foes of British coercion, Dickinson said, were “now strenuously endeavouring, IN A PEACEFUL MANNER … to preserve our freedom.” But if Galloway thwarted the planned congress and British tyranny prevailed, he would be “justly chargeable with all the dreadful consequences to the Colonies.” Dickinson asserted that if only a congress of all the colonies could meet and institute a national boycott, North’s government would have to back down, as Great Britain is “So dependent … on us for supplies.”45

  During the spring and summer of 1774, Dickinson played an active role in the public rallies that were designed to force Galloway’s hand. He spoke to an overflow gathering of some three hundred in the City Tavern in June and the following month presided over an outdoor meeting that drew more than eight thousand Philadelphians. Galloway, of course, yielded in the end, but he kept Dickinson out of the First Continental Congress. However, the fall elections brought about the decisive swing in power within the Pennsylvania assembly that enabled Dickinson to enter Congress just prior to its adjournment.

  Given the tectonic shift in Pennsylvania politics and Dickinson’s national renown, it was hardly surprising that he would be a major player in the Second Continental Congress. To this point, Dickinson had been seen as a radical—an archfoe of encroaching royal authority, an opponent of the Stamp Act, a critic of the Townshend Duties, and a sworn enemy of the Tea Act and Intolerable Acts. But anyone who perused his writings over the past decade would have found that Dickinson had steadfastly espoused the merits of America’s ties to the British Empire. Furthermore, he had always insisted that Great Britain’s leaders would back down when faced with peaceful protests by the united colonists.

  Until 1775, he had been correct. Then came Lexington and Concord. Dickinson had been confident that the measures taken by the First Congress would lead London to assuage the colonists in some way or other. He had been certain that peaceful reconciliation was on the horizon. Instead, war had come. In shock, he declared that London had responded to Congress with a “Rescript … written in Blood.”46 War with the mother country, he thought, was “unnatural & astonishing,” but like every other delegate to this Congress, he supported America’s armed resistance. He believed that Great Britain had launched an “impious War of Tyranny against Innocence,” a “cruel War” brought on by a “mad or villainous … Ministry” dominated “by a few worthless persons,” men whom he referred to as “Fools or Knaves.” America’s cause was “a righteous Cause,” he said, adding, “I hope every Man of Sense & Virtue will draw his Sword.”47

  Yet, Dickinson remained attached to reconciliation. Most of those who would be his colleagues when Congress reconvened in May shared his hope that harmony with the mother country could be restored. The great divide between Dickinson and many of his fellow deputies would not come over whether to reconcile with London but over how best to restore the Anglo-American union. Jolted by the outbreak of hostilities, Dickinson appears to have spent the next few weeks in restless contemplation. Few congressmen understood the reality of the imperial troubles, or of the war that lay ahead, with such clarity as did Dickinson.

  Before Lexington and Concord, Dickinson had optimistically believed that a unified, tenacious, and peaceful resistance by Congress would be sufficient to topple North’s government and bring on a new ministry committed to peace. The outbreak of war caused the scales to fall from his eyes. Within days of learning of the bloody combat along Battle Road, he concluded that North’s “Ministry will stand.” It enjoyed large majorities in both houses of Parliament and would not face another election for up to seven years. He conceded too that North had been an “artful” leader in the run-up to war, succeeding even in persuading the most influential residents in the homeland that “Great Britain is contesting for her very Existence in this Dispute with America.” It was a bitter truth, he thought, that the actions taken by North’s government were popular with the British people. America had friends in Great Britain, but not enough. There were merchants for whom the war would be economically disastrous, but they had little political influence. Wise men, the likes of Chatham, Camden, and Burke, sat in Parliament and spoke for a “small Band of independent virtuous Spirits” who loathed North’s policies, but they were “personally odious to the King.”

  Dickinson was no less sensible—prescient, in fact—about the war. He foresaw a long, difficult conflict, and he worried that wars were unpredictable. He had no doubt that before this conflict ended, Americans would “taste … deeply of that bitter Cup” of adversity. Battles would be lost. Diseases would sweep through the army’s camps. To supply armies spread over a continent as vast as North America would be a demanding, perhaps impossible, assignment. The northern colonies should expect invasions by forces of Canadians and Indians. Slave insurrections in the southern colonies were an all-too-real likelihood. America would face a “forbidding” adversary in the Royal Navy. In the face of such daunting peril, it would be difficult to sustain morale. Dickinson knew that as tribulations increased, and persisted, there would be those who “in a tumultuary Passion or rather Phrenzy for Peace” would “cast away in one Day of Haste & Weakness” all that had been gained “by Years of Blood.” That made it imperative that America engage in a sincere effort to achieve reconciliation before the war became long and bloody and war weariness set in.

  The solution that Dickinson hit on was not for Congress to abandon armed resistance, but for it to accompany its war effort with an appeal to the king. The monarch, unlike Lord North and the members of Parliament who represented local districts, was responsible for the security and best interest of the entire British Empire. Dickinson was convinced that the time was right to approach the Crown. Britain “has lost a Battle—& all America is more united & more determined” tha
n those in the mother country could ever have imagined would be the case. Persuading himself that the monarch had not had a hand in the decision to resort to force—he and many other reconciliationists clung to the notion that the war had been brought on solely by a conniving set of ministers—Dickinson believed that the king would want to act to prevent a civil war once he saw that the American people were “vigorously preparing” for armed resistance. Furthermore, a petition would demonstrate to the king that the colonists were acting in self-defense and harbored no secret agendas. Even if an appeal to the monarch failed, to have tried for reconciliation would be useful. Should this indeed become a long war, an unsuccessful appeal to the king would unite the colonists, for no one could subsequently say that Congress had “omitted proper applications for obtaining Peace.”

  Dickinson was driven by his belief that American prosperity and security stemmed from its ties to the empire, but much like Galloway, he was haunted by a conservative’s fear of the forces for change that so often were unleashed by war. As the leader of the faction that for a decade had represented the disenchanted inhabitants of western Pennsylvania, Dickinson knew full well that many Americans longed for substantive change. He had in fact ridden those cravings as the means of forcing Galloway to permit Pennsylvania to participate in the First Congress. But Dickinson understood that it was easier to start making reforms than to stop making them. Once a reform movement commenced, it built a momentum for further change. “[A] people does not reform with moderation” was how he had put it in one of the Letters from a Farmer. He knew, too, that a people driven by the passions of war to hate everything that was British might be especially unrestrained.48